The Janus Stone

‘Happy about having a bastard grandchild,’ rumbles her father. ‘Are you out of your mind?’

Obviously, thinks Ruth. She must have been out of her mind to assume, for one second, that her parents would be happy at the news. That they would rejoice with her. That they would accept that, while their daughter doesn’t have a partner, she does have a baby and that the baby is, if not planned, desperately wanted. How desperately, Ruth does not like to admit even to herself. All she knows is, the moment when her suspicions crystallised into that thin blue line on her pregnancy kit, her heart went into overdrive. It was as if every heartbreak and disappointment in her life, to say nothing of the traumas of the past few months, had faded into nothingness, leaving only a boundless blue contentment.

‘I hope you’ll change your minds,’ is all she says. She stands and helps her mother up from the tree stump.

‘We never change our minds about anything,’ says her mother proudly. ‘That’s not the sort of people we are.’

You can say that again, thinks Ruth. Being Born Again has only increased her parents’ already well-developed sense of infallibility. After all, if God has chosen you, how can you ever be wrong again? About anything. Her parents found God when she was a teenager. Far too late for Ruth, although she had, for a time, accompanied them to services. She has never found God but, then again, she isn’t about to go looking.

Her father gestures dramatically towards Severndroog Castle in the background.

‘Our values don’t change. They haven’t changed since that castle was built in the Middle Ages.’

Ruth does not add that the castle is, in fact, an eighteenth-century folly or that the Middle Ages were presumably rife with illegitimate babies and unmarried mothers. She only says, ‘Well I hope you’ll feel differently when the baby’s born.’

Neither of her parents answers but, when they cross Avery Hill Road, Ruth’s father takes her arm in a protective way, as if being pregnant has seriously impaired her traffic sense. This Ruth finds obscurely comforting.

Sunday afternoon in a King’s Lynn suburb. Cars are being washed, fresh-faced families set out on bike rides, dogs are walked, newspapers are read and the smell of Sunday lunch permeates the air. After his own lunch (roast lamb with vegetarian option for Laura) Nelson announces his intention of mowing the lawn. Michelle says she’ll go to the gym (she’s the only woman in the world who wants to go to the gym on a Sunday afternoon) and Laura says she’ll go too, for a swim. That leaves Nelson and sixteen-year-old Rebecca, who immediately disappears upstairs to plug herself into her iPod and computer. This suits Nelson fine. He wants to be by himself, performing some mundane domestic task. It’s the way he thinks best.

By the time he has got out the lawnmower, found that it has run out of petrol, fetched the spare can from the boot of his Mercedes, dropped the garage door on his foot, fixed the broken clutch cable and moved Michelle’s washing line, he’s thinking furiously. Is Ruth pregnant? Is it his baby? They spent one night together, back in February, but, at the same time, he knew Ruth was seeing her ex-boyfriend, Peter. It’s possible then that the baby is Peter’s. And what about Erik, Ruth’s old tutor? He always thought Ruth was very close to Erik. Could they have been sleeping together? It’s a funny thing but he thinks of Ruth as somehow existing on a higher plane than most people. The night they slept together had seemed removed from the ordinary motivations of lust and desire, though those had played their part. He and Ruth had come together as equals who had just been through a terrible experience together. It had just seemed… right. The sex, Nelson remembers, had been incredible.

Somehow, remembering that sense of rightness, Nelson feels convinced that Ruth did conceive that night. It seems almost preordained. Jesus – he gives the mower a vicious shove – he’s thinking like some crap women’s magazine. It’s highly unlikely that she got pregnant; she was probably using birth control (which was never mentioned; they didn’t talk much). He’s not even sure that she is pregnant. She has probably just put on weight.

‘Dad!’

Rebecca is leaning out of an upstairs window. With her long blonde hair and serious face she looks oddly accusatory, like a Victorian picture of a wronged woman. For one stupid moment Nelson imagines that his daughter knows all about Ruth, is about to tell Michelle…

‘Dad. It’s Doug on the phone. He says do you want to go to the pub tonight.’

Nelson pauses, breathing hard. The smell of mown grass is almost overpowering.

‘Thanks, love. Tell him no, I’d rather spend the night in with my family.’

Rebecca shrugs. ‘Suit yourself. But I think Mum’s going out to the pictures.’